Monday, April 10, 2017

Nearly 1.2 million people have applied for asylum in Germany in the last two years and it would be extremely naive to think that no criminal has arrived. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) 300,000 cases were registered in 2016 in which at least one immigrant was arrested on suspicion of committing a crime.According to Christian Pfeiffer, criminologist and former justice minister of the state of Lower Saxony. The behavior of refugees often depends on their chances of being allowed to stay, making some groups more prone to criminal activity than others. "There are, for example, the North Africans, who, soon after they reach Germany, learn that they don't have any chance of staying here. They are then frustrated and angry and behave like we witnessed in New Year's Eve in Cologne [December 2015]," Pfeiffer says. These people are also under pressure to stay in Germany and make money by working illegally or becoming criminals, he adds. According to Pfeiffer, studies show that Syrian and Iraqi refugees tend to commit fewer crimes because they don't want to spoil their chances of obtaining legal permission to stay in Germany. A rejected asylum application consequently means no access to language or integration courses. "Thus, there is a kind of a class-based society that emerges among refugees - ones who have good prospects and those who don't," Pfeiffer explains. Even those who have a good chance of staying often get involved in criminal activities if they are forced to live with many people in temporary shelters and sometimes even with communities that they are in conflict with in their home countries, he adds.In 2010, nearly 70 percent of the population in Germany consisted of people who were over the age of 30. A majority the refugees who came to Germany in 2015 were between 14 and 30 years of age - for Pfeiffer, the main group responsible for a majority of crimes committed anywhere. "A small group is in every part of the world extremely dangerous - young men between 14 and 30. They commit 70 percent of most criminal activities. This group of males makes up for 37 percent of all refugees," making the crime rate among immigrants much higher, Pfeiffer says. "This explains why 100 Germans will have a lower crime rate compared to 100 refugees, because among Germans, the people are older and there are more women, he explains." This age group is also the reason why more sexual assaults are being reported, Pfeiffer adds.One also needs to take into account the fact that the number of complaints against foreigners is always higher than complaints against people of one's own ethnicity. "If Max is assaulted by Moritz, then the chances of registering a police report are 19 percent," says Pfeiffer, using two ethnic German names as an example. But if Max is assaulted by Mehmet - a typical name for a Turkish man - the chances of reporting the crime go up to 29 percent,